Recent Study On Marriage Held Up By Hot Air

September 28, 1986|By Susan Faludi, KNT News Service

Are you a single, college-educated woman, morose about your declining marriage prospects?

It just may be the effect of a six-month, 1950ish barrage launched largely by the media. They have invented a national marital crisis on the basis of a single academic experiment to predict the future marriages of college-educated women -- an experiment of dubious statistical merit.

Here's what it predicted: By age 30, a woman with a college degree who was born in the mid-'50s and has never married has a 20 percent shot at snatching the wedding ring; by 35, she has a 5 percent chance; by 40, it shrinks to 2.6 percent.

Publications everywhere appear to have interpreted the study as a signal that they could vent old prejudices. ''Are These Old Maids?'' asked the March 31 cover of People magazine (with pictures of Donna Mills, Diane Sawyer, Sharon Gless and Linda Ronstadt). A New York newspaper's headline cackled, ''College-educated Women Not Married By 30 Put On Shelf.'' The June 2 cover story of Newsweek snickered, ''Too Late For Prince Charming?'' Newsweek also graciously provided single women with a two-toned graph dramatizing ''Your Chances of Getting Married.'' As the curve plunged into the Old Maid range of 30 years old and beyond, the chart's color scheme faded from hot red to frigid blue.

BACK TO SQUARE ONE

This is how it all began:

Two sociologists from Yale and an economist from Harvard wanted to see if they could project the probabilities of college-educated women's marrying at particular ages.

What didn't show up in the papers was a flatly contradictory marriage study completed by the U.S. Census Bureau about the same time. The bureau's statisticians used far more extensive data: The agency used the 1980 census, which polled one in six households; the Yale sociologists used a sample survey that queried only one in 1,500 households. The bureau also used a time-tested model applied successfully for years to project actuarial tables; the Yale- Harvard professors tried a model that has never before been used to predict behavior. The bureau's findings: Women at 30 have not a 20 percent, but a 66 percent chance at marriage. Women at 40 have not a 2.6 percent, but a 23 percent chance.

The Yale-Harvard study wended its way into newsprint through a chance phone call. A lifestyle writer at the Stamford, Conn., Advocate, grinding out the annual Valentine's Day feature, happened to telephone Yale sociologist Neil Bennett for advice. Bennett mumbled something about a statistical formula he was testing. The results, he warned, hadn't been published or written up yet, but the writer was intrigued and the story ended up on Page 1. The wire services picked it up from there, and the next day Bennett was getting phone calls from as far away as Australia.

The story got increasingly muddled as it made the reportorial rounds. Speculation became fact. Predictions degenerated into foregone conclusions. And some information that was passed around was just plain wrong.

For example, the New York Times, People and dozens of other publications reported that 25-year-old college-educated women would have only a 50 percent chance at marriage. In fact, the Yale scholars never forecast the marital odds for 25-year-old women.

Ultimately, the press took arithmetical guesswork about future behavior and turned it into a judgment on the present state of women. The sociologists' tentative theory that ''educated women might not marry in as large numbers in the future'' was translated in the papers as ''educated women are desperate.'' It should come as no surprise that the press embraced the study's ''findings'' with a lustiness untempered by skepticism. The press is a mirror of the public, and the public is increasingly anxiety-ridden these days about the decline in the American family, the 50 percent divorce rate, the increase in childlessness, the discourteous tendency of uppity educated women to do as they please.

Because spreading the story of the spinsters has an ulterior, if subconscious, motive -- it confirms everyone's worst suspicions -- the marriage study has gone unchallenged by the press or the public.

CONCLUSIONS WERE NEVER CHALLENGED

No one ever asked, for example, whether the study is right. In fact, the study's sociologists applied unconventional and largely untested methods to reach their conclusions. They used a parametric model to predict future behavior -- the first time that the model has been used to make projections.

Its inventor, Princeton University professor Ansley Coale, designed the model to look back at the marriage patterns of elderly wives in Europe in the 1940s, not to forecast the prospects of young women today. ''In principle, the model may be applicable to women who haven't completed their marital history,'' Coale said, ''but it is risky to apply it.''